


the best laid plans this side of america

by openended



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Apocalypse, Boredom, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-02
Updated: 2012-05-02
Packaged: 2017-11-04 17:01:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/396139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the best plans lend themselves to a lot of boredom.  Sam, Cam, surveillance they don't actually need to do, and a cargo ship on the dark side of the moon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the best laid plans this side of america

**Author's Note:**

  * For [gingasaur](https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingasaur/gifts).



> For gingasaur. Because she correctly guessed the number of loads of laundry I had to do last weekend. (Six, if you're curious).

They’ve decided to drink the last of the beer tonight.

It isn’t quite the last of the beer, since Sam has a couple of jugs and some equipment in the other room and the status of the liquid inside everything is a very vague “fermenting, be patient,” but Cam isn’t entirely sold on her alcohol distillation skills, at least not since the vodka debacle back at the Alpha Site. Sam blames it on alien potatoes having a vastly different starch content than she anticipated, but Cam thinks she was just trying too hard on her first attempt; bathtub booze isn't supposed to taste good.

But it’s the last of the bottled beer that they smuggled out of the Alpha Site, which in turn was smuggled out of the SGC before the Ori took control and shut down the gate. General Landry should have their heads for spending time smuggling alcohol off base instead of equipment, but he’s indulged in it once or twice and doesn’t have a leg to stand on. And, anyway, this isn’t a permanent setup. They knew the attack was coming weeks beforehand, not enough time to stop it immediately but enough time to get a plan in motion. 

_“It’s simple,” Sam says, and Cam immediately knows that it isn’t. Because anything that starts out with Sam saying “it’s simple” in that tone of voice is inevitably so complicated it needs at least ten seven-syllable words to explain. “We know when they’re going to attack and based on basic population statistics and analysis of past behavior, we can figure out where they’re going to send Priors and try to get their roots in. We put our people, people we can trust, in those cities to become the Prior’s right hand. They won’t actually convert, and when they’ve gained the Prior’s trust enough and we’re ready to attack, we have men on the inside.”_

_“And in the meantime, we…?” Cam motions through the air, hoping that she’s not going to tell him that he’s been chosen as one of the guys to put up with the Ori nonsense. He cannot guarantee that he won’t punch one of them in the head and blow their whole plan, or at least get himself killed._

_She shrugs and pokes at a piece of equipment until it stops blinking and then carefully places it in a box. “Set up camp in the Alpha Site. We’ll have rotating teams keeping surveillance from the moon so we know when everything’s set.”_

_“From the moon?” He’s still waiting for the complicated bit to set in, a plan that involves computers and physics and smart viruses or something._

_“We’ll take a cargo ship and cloak it and land it on the other side of the moon. The Ori won’t be able to pick us up if we’re cloaked and they probably won’t waste the effort having ships visually scan the entire solar system, so we can fly in and out safely.”_

_“So,” he picks up something that looks like a rock. She grabs it out of his hands before he can do more than wonder what planet it came from, and it goes into the box with the no-longer blinking thing. “That’s it? That’s the plan?”_

_“Of course not. There’s more to it than that.”_

_Ah. There it is._

Cam stares at the two bottles and realizes that, between the two of them and all of their equipment, they don’t actually have a bottle opener and these are not the twist-off kind. Sam takes one from him, lines it up against the arm of the command chair, tilts her head and stares at the angle for a moment, and takes a deep breath before smashing the palm of her hand down on the bottle. The cap goes flying off in the other direction to be permanently lost until someone decides to clean out the detritus left from the surveillance teams and Sam’s standing in front of him, grinning, with a beer that isn’t the least bit foamy.

“Can’t believe you never learned that trick.”

He looks at her pathetically enough that she takes pity on him and exchanges her open bottle for his closed one. She opens the other in much the same way and drops into the seat.

For all that this is her plan (hers and Jackson’s, because Sam may be brilliant, but Cam knows there’s no way she came up with all that “population statistics” and “past behavior” crap on her own), she’s really bored by it. There’s a certain amount of waiting that’s tolerable and they hit that point last week. Cam thinks it’s why Landry switched up the surveillance schedule and sent him and Sam now instead of three weeks when it’s officially their turn. If Sam fixed anything else at the Alpha Site, if she made anything else more efficient, no one else was going to have anything to do.

They sip their beer in silence and stare out the window at the moon in front of them. It’s not an interesting view, especially on this side; it’s barely going to get any light while they’re here. Mars is too far away to really see and it’s not like they have a good shot of the Earth. They spent two days playing the “what do you think that rock looks like” game before they ran out of rocks. Cam had then made up stories about moon monsters until Sam told him to please shut up. That’s about when the still showed up in the cargo area. He has no idea where she found the parts or ingredients for it and the idea that she thought ahead to bring everything is simultaneously very Sam and very terrifying.

Their surveillance systems are set up and automated and will chirp or beep or flash or something, Cam wasn’t really paying attention when Sam explained it, when they pick up anything that requires their attention. They wouldn’t need anyone here to monitor the equipment at all if they weren’t so certain that the Ori were scanning radio frequencies.

Cam leans back in the pilot’s seat and props his feet up on the console, careful not to touch anything important with his boots, and tries to imagine that he’s on a porch somewhere watching the sunset. He hears Sam fidget behind him and open a book.

And then close the book.

And then open it again.

And flip to a page about halfway through, then three-quarters of the way through, and finally the end.

Sam sighs and slides gracelessly off the chair to find another book or something else to do. She bypasses their packs and the stack of books Daniel loaned them and disappears into the cargo hold where he can hear her fussing with the still equipment; a faint clanging and a twist of a wrench, followed by a contemplative _hm_ that really makes him question the quality of the end product.

She comes back out, collects a lollipop and a book, and sits back down in the chair. She unwraps the lollipop and sticks it in her mouth and frowns at the flavor. She shifts, tucking her feet underneath her. And then again, just one foot under her thigh. She cracks open the book.

When she swings her legs over the edge of the chair, Cam gives up. He turns the chair around on its pivot and glares at her.

“You’re worse than Vala.”

“No one is worse than Vala,” she says around the lollipop. She skims a page and then flips through to the next chapter.

He’s halfway turned back to the console so he can replay her the security camera footage of just how much worse than Vala she’s been for the past half an hour when it occurs to him. This isn’t just Sam being bored and not having anything to tinker with, fix, build, blow up, program, experiment, or otherwise do. This is Sam being bored with a specific solution in mind.

“Sam?”

“Mmm?”

For all she’s trying to ignore him and for all she’s trying to not be bored, she manages to inject an impressive amount of interest into the non-committal syllable.

“You know you can just ask, right?” It’s the arrangement they’ve always had, since the Academy. Sometimes Sam just needs a little reminder. He knows she’s already been thinking about it: he’s seen the way she’s been crossing her legs. And, frankly, there’s a limited amount of solitaire he can play and he is in no way interested in finding out what that limit is.

Sam taps at the console embedded in the chair’s arm and a light goes off on Cam’s display. He knows just enough about Goa’uld ship design to know that means the camera’s disabled. Another tap and the lights dim. It’s less for mood and more for practicality; she tried to explain something about dilating pupils and bright lights the first night she stayed over at his apartment in the Springs and spent ten minutes adjusting his lamps, but he wasn’t exactly paying attention to the science.

Cam’s about to ask if they should maybe find a blanket or something to cover the floor because it’s cold and hard, but her shirt hits him in the head seconds before she slides into his lap and suddenly he thinks that the chair is a damn good location. 

She tastes like sour apple.

* * *

It’s hard to track the passage of time when you don’t have a reliable external light source, and Sam will mock him for days if he checks his watch, but some time later they do end up finding a blanket and lying on the floor. Cam doesn’t think he’ll be able to look anyone who needs to use this cargo ship after them in the eye, but that’s a problem for another day. Their beer bottles, now empty, sit very carefully far away from them. He thinks he’ll miss beer, but not enough to try Sam’s homebrew.

“Better?” He asks, reaching behind them to grab another blanket to drape over them. The one thing they haven’t been able to figure out about the ship is how to make the air anything other than just slightly above freezing. He wonders if Sam can do something about that while they’re here.

Sam nods and tucks herself against his side. She’ll move in a few minutes, though there really isn’t any reason to. “I am not worse than Vala. _No one_ is worse than Vala.”

Cam knows he should let this go, but he just can’t. It’s like someone thinking Star Trek and Star Wars are interchangeable. “Vala tells everyone when she’s bored and wants to have sex with Daniel.”

Propping her head up with her hand, Sam smirks at him. “But Daniel doesn’t give in when she says that and then she keeps annoying everyone with how bored she is.”

“Still not trying that beer of yours.” Cam knows when he’s been beat.

“Yes you are.”

“No, I’m not. I like what little brain cells I have left.”

“I told you the bad vodka was the potatoes, not me. Chemically, it was a perfectly sound process. I even had someone check it.”

“You had someone check your work?” He raises a mockingly shocked eyebrow.

She narrows her eyes and glares at him, something that might ordinarily be scary but the blanket has fallen to her waist and his own eyes are very, very distracted by her breasts. He turns a little and slides his leg between hers. She gasps, more surprised than turned on, but he brushes his fingers against her side and the gasp changes in note.

“How long are we here?” He whispers against her neck, gently rolling her onto her back. One of her legs hooks around his calf, holding him in place.

“Couple more days,” she says, arching her back when his lips touch her neck.

Cam smirks at her. “Plenty of time to relieve all your boredom.”


End file.
